Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

shadowy figure lurking behind all these roles. But the shadowy
figure remains shadowy, negative, a refusal of the masks forced
upon her: she/we cannot be an alternative identity. The shadowy
figure is a scream, a question, a crisis, a menace, a potential, a
we, a flow. Doing flows: any definition of it is an abstraction.
The struggle against the character masks moves faster than the
concept: any attempt to pin it down by giving it a definition
contributes unwillingly to its recapture.
Any institutionalisation of struggle is problematic, simply
because there is a flow of struggle that does not respect
institutional boundaries, although it may be hindered by them.
This is not just a problem of party organisation. Sometimes
we tend to think that the rejection of the party as a form of
organisation solves all problems, but many of the problems are
reproduced in the institutionalisation of non-party forms of
struggle. The institutionalisation seeks to give a certain course to
struggle, but struggle has a dynamic that is not easily channelled.
We try to give it shape as the Other Campaign, for example, and
it surges in other forms that do not fit in to our institutional preconceptions.
Forms of organisation need to be open and flexible
to avoid creating identifications that hinder the movement of
struggle. The only way in which we can strengthen subversion
is by constantly subverting itY
We are repressed. The shadowy figure behind the mask is a
repressed figure. Our starting point, our 'pivot', the relation
between useful or concrete doing and abstract labour is a relation
of repression. Our potential, our power to do, our capacity
to determine socially our own doing, is a repressed potential,
power, capacity. We exist in the mode of being denied, as
character mask. If we exist in the mode of being denied, we do
not exist outside that denial, but we are not fully subsumed into
that denial: to say that we exist in the mode of being denied is
to say that we exist also in the mode of denying that denial:
this double negation does not lead to a positive we, but to an
ec-static we, a we in revolt.
Revolution, then, is the return of the repressedY Not just of
the repressed sectors of the population (proletarians, women,
indigenous, blacks, and so on), but of that which is repressed
within us. It is the revolt of that which exists against and pushes
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